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This is Joe Elliot’s second collection of pitch-perfect poems.

Opposable Thumb is essential reading. In these poems, Joe Elliot brings a whopping arsenal of technique to the table to create a sumptuous feast of meaning without equal signs or slashes…Here, song is thought. It all rings true. Essential the way mindfulness is essential. Enjoy the view

—Mitch Highfill

How has the world limped along for so long without Joe Elliot’s new book? If you want to relearn language, please read these poems, which release the kinetic potential of the page like toasters dropped into bathtubs

—Marcella Durand

A fixture on the New York poetry scene for more than 20 years, Elliot’s massively summative debut is as rigorous as it is loose, and casual as it is elegant. Each of these nearly 50 poems, grouped into four sections, progresses not so much by telling stories as describing several events, on a tiny scale, at once: “A Godzilla statuette steps/ crushing grey offices at the far// end of a bar. Next to it in a 3-piece/ suit a gratuitously rude// drunk sways, points his palm/ corder at a man who// is paid to expertly slice/ a variety of fish and smile// evenly.” Over the course of the book, Elliot’s speaker takes “a slow roll through Baltimore,” chooses a fork “In Orlando when the day of the dead finally arrived” and finds that “Super-model-dom is to dungarees as attitude is to thought.” But one-liners are not the point. As Elliot’s observations accrue, a portrait emerges of a singular consciousness driven by a wry, subtle, detective-like love for its time and place: “The sound of a trumpet being/ practiced two floors below. Pushing a cat-like presence aside/ to get at it.” (Dec.)
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About the Author

Joe Elliot lives in New York City.

Selected by Juliana Spahr for Subpress, MOHAWK/SAMOA: TRANSMIGRATIONS draws on the songs and stories of two geographically distant cultures to create a unique poetic collaboration. By writing beautifully spare new poems that stem out of each other’s translations from Mohawk and Samoan, James Thomas Stevens and Caroline Sinavaiana have ” created] an exciting mesh where Mohawk and Samoan inform each other to erase boundaries between individual and collective, past and present, inner and outer worlds.” —Arthur Sze

“Mohawk / Samoa Transmigrations is a slender project for a perfect-bound book, containing really just eight short poems apiece by James Thomas Stevens & Caroline Sinavaiana, but it also is quite a bit more than that. What that is lies all in the setting. Stevens is an Akwesasne Mohawk poet, teaching now at SUNY Fredonia. Sinavaiana is a Samoan-born poet, teaching now at the University of Hawai’i, spending half of each year on O’ahu, but the remainder of it in Dharamsala, India, where I believe she is involved in the large Tibetan Buddhist community in exile there. —Ron Silliman.

See more of Silliman’s review here

The Black Warrior and Other Poems showcases Lauture’s powerfully unadorned verse. Strands of French and Creole dot the surface of this mostly English-language work, evoking both Lauture’s Haitian origins and present-day realities as a politically engaged college professor in the Bronx.

Denizé Lauture’s poetry uses simple words that create striking and unexpected images carrying the light and the freshness of the air of the high altitudes where he was born and cannot forget, with the intent of helping to change an unjust society. Thus, his poetry is functional in order to awaken those stuck in lethargic indifference.

—Franck Laraque

See Denizé Lauture’s other Subpress book, a kiss to the land, here

About the Author

Denizé Lauture, first born of 13 peasant children, migrated to the US from Haiti in 1968. He is a professor of French and Spanish at St Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill and lives in the Bronx. Lauture writes in Creole, English, and French. He is the author of Blues of the Lightning Metamorphosis, Father and Son, Running the Road to ABC, Mothers and Daughters, The Curse of the Poet, and When the Denizen Weeps.

In his new collection of poetry, Daniel Bouchard responds to our contemporary dystopia with exacting description and incisive criticism. The cognitive dissonance between what we are in daily life and what we know about the history we inhabit in America: this is the matter of this book. It is laid out in such a way that we can see what our minds are made of, and study the problem. Here the rhetoric of new poetry (“Hades faces environmental crises”) is at ease with both beauty and corruption.

—Fanny Howe

A dynamic, serious book, exactingly descriptive and topographical about our contemporary dystopia, our “NorthEast Kingdom,” our weather, our times. In striking poems of political intensity and social accounting, Daniel Bouchard names the world we are in with rage, dissent, mourning, a satiric eye, and an ironic slant.

— Rachel Blau DuPlessis

From Publishers Weekly

New England land-, sea- and cityscapes draw reinforcement from blue-state frustration and aggression in this smart, energetic, original second collection. Bouchard (Diminutive Revolutions) first surveys coastlines and towns where winter and spring unsettle the citizens: “We have mockingbird/ for neighbor I wonder/ what his rent is.” Soon enough, though, the collection merges its descriptive interests with invective against bad writers and bad world leaders: after September 11, Bouchard says, “Where we trudged along to disaster/ Now we shall sprint.” Bouchard’s mix of slippery forms and obvious anger lands him in heretofore unknown—and clearly productive—territory halfway between Juvenal and James Schuyler, between ancient ideas of poets as stern social critics and newer investigations of language’s roots. Bouchard may be best known for editing the provocative poetry-and-criticism journal The Poker, and his poems do give familiar certainties and worldly powers a poke in the eye. Just as impressive as their intellectual efforts, though, is the dry lyricism that underlies them, in which Bouchard shows us not just what he believes, but why he feels as he does, and why he can’t help it: “I have the poet’s dual instinct to say/ on the one hand it doesn’t matter and/ the other to set everyone straight,” he concludes; “I must have more hands than that.” (June)
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Daniel Bouchard’s books include Spider Drop, The Filaments (Zasterle Press), and Diminutive Revolutions . His chapbook, Art and Nature was published by Ugly Duckling Press in 2014.

Sherry Brennan, poet and translator, lives in New York and works at New School University. Earlier chapbooks include Taken, again today and The Resemblances. She has published widely in journals such as Chain, How(ever), New American Writing and raddle moon. Recent essays can be found in African American Review and the online journal Jacket.

This anthology of not-yet household names, edited by Jordan Davis and Sarah Manguso, features work by Max Winter, Michael Savitz, Jeni Olin, Amy Lingafelter, Tanya Larkin, Jennifer Knox, Cole Heinowitz, Tim Griffin, Johannes Göransson, Greta Goetz, Alan Gilbert, Tonya Foster, Katie Degentesh, Del Ray Cross, Chris O. Cook, Carson Cistulli, Jim Behrle, and B. J. Atwood-Fukuda.

“What excites me about these poets is that, beside their talent, they are all blessed with the terrible freedom of not yet having published books. I take special joy in reading work by these poets who, while already setting their new stars into the poetical firmament, are not mired in the stability-enforcing, niche-assigning public consciousness.”
—Sarah Manguso

Given that there are two kinds of readers in English, those who are passionate fans of the poetry of Linh Dinh and those who have yet to read his writing, All Around What Empties Out is a major event, too long overdue. These are works without waste, with the driest sense of humor and, throughout, an underlying feel for the pain of living that calls to mind Kathy Acker as much as Kafka.

— Ron Silliman

From Publishers Weekly
Following up on the short stories of Fake House, Linh Dinh compiles three coveted, lacerating chapbooks in All Around What Empties Out. From the hilarious and horrific rhetorical questions of “Drunkard Boxing” (“My hump for your glasses?”) to the withering stanzas and paragraphs of “A Small Triumph Over Lassitude” (“wildlife frolicking at ground level”) and the definitely half full “A Glass of Water” (“Baby I’m not a dictionary bloated I-Ching”), the cover’s translucent toilet seat is just the beginning.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam, came to the US in 1975, and is living in Philadelphia. In 2005, he was a David Wong fellow at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. He spent 2002-2003 in Italy as a guest of the International Parliament of Writers and the town of Certaldo. His books include the story collections Fake House (Seven Stories Press, 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press, 2004), and the poetry chapbook Drunkard Boxing (Singing Horse Press, 1998) and the collections American Tatts (Chax, 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School, 2006), Jam Alerts (Chax, 2007), and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy (Chax, 2009).

Published by Subpress/A’A Arts/Tinfish.

Composed but in disregard for order,’ this marvelous collaboration after the fact results in a wisdom literature for our time, living out its adage: ‘the self is a planned obsolescence / and can be out done.’ Writing separately off of eastern philosophical texts, then splicing their work together, Carll & Marsh reaffirm a link between chance and change, wisdom and accident, while suggesting new possibilities for poetic two-upsmanship. When prompted by their names, my on-line I Ching pronounced their book a ‘Gathering Together. Success.’ And so it is.
—Susan M. Schultz

Richards’s diagrammatic readings of some classics in American cinema engage those ever present questions of race, identity, class, and culture with humor and chaos. Blowing apart the reading experience with boxes and columns that read both horizontally and vertically, and infusing each text with shadows and crevices from which retreat is impossible, Deborah Richards has created her own genre. Her own template, even.

—Renee Gladman

Richards’s work can seem more like an information map for the mind, like the insights recorded in a study guide we create for ourselves before an exam. She creates a form in which to record and relive the moment of insight.

—Ed Roberson

After School Session is a generous and brassy cull of correspondence from Brett Evans to Brock Downs. The poems are a direct jack into the miniamp of postcard art sent between two friends; they hit hard in an open-all-night punk rock show for the audience of one. Like the form of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, limited by the small size of a breast pocket notebook, Evans’s gumbo is cooked in the scant pot of the postcard—an ‘afterschool rest stop of the imagination / real special.’ The poems offer one slamming and damming notation after another. Down’s artful arrangement and selection should stand as a model for what one can do with our hazardous mail.

—Tom Devaney

Cover art by Zach Wollard. Published by Subpress and Buck Downs Books.

Brett Evans’s work has been featured in the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, Another South:Experimental Writing in the South, and Poets for Living Waters. It also appears in the biography Ernie K-Doe: the R&B Emperor of New Orleans. He is a regular contributor to One Fell Swoop, Lungfull!, and unarmed magazines. Other books of the author include Slosh Models, Ready-to-Eat Individual (with Frank Sherlock), and After School Session , as well as the chapbooks Ways to Use Lance and Pisa Can. A member of the bands Skin Verb and Splinter Group, he lives on the lee of the Bayou St. John levee in New Orleans, LA.